Live a Lie
by Victoria Hughes
Summary: Cybertronians: a benevolent and noble race corrupted. Or ... not. A different take on Cybertron and the All Spark.


_This gets equally blamed on Moonsheen and Bumblebee. Don't ask. A weird take on the Cybertrons, based on the movie. In short: Why does everything the All Spark's energy is channeled into turn into a mechanical monster? I mean, it creates Sparks – sentient mechanical life forms – so why isn't there an equal chance the created Transformer would turn out to be benevolent or malignant? This fic is my answer._

**Live a Lie**

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away …

Wait. No, I take that back. It's the same galaxy, but you know, the galaxy is very large, so don't go underestimating the distances here.

Long ago, in a star cluster far, far away … there was a planet.

By your standards this planet was … hm. _Dead_ is the word, I guess. Nothing grew on it in the traditional, organic sense. Mostly there was a lot of rock – alloys, metal, and some volcanic stuff. Very pretty, maybe … to a geologist. So basically, this planet is a big hunk of rock.

And then, there was the All Spark.

Can't say I know how the All Spark works. To you, it's just this giant cube. When it touches mechanical things, they become sentient. Maybe some aliens made it as a huge science class experiment – blasphemy, I know, but still. Whatever the case, the All Spark was on this hunk of rock planet, and somehow, it was making things that _you_ think aren't alive, alive.

Okay. Think giant robots. Now think giant robots with a brain. _Now, _think giant robots with a brain that can form an opinion, and that opinion is _you suck._

Oh, yeah, you probably believe all that junk Optimus Prime spits out about how Cybertronians were a good and noble race, blah blah blah. I'll tell you what: he doesn't like to lie, it's true, and for the most part he thinks he's telling the truth … maybe. Primes have a weird relationship with the All Spark, so hell if I know. The point is, did you ever catch how he slips that word in there, 'Cybertronian _Empire_'?

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Anyway, so now there are all these little mechanical people running around, and the All Spark is making the whole planet different – terraforming, you could say. The planet itself is alive from the All Spark, and spitting out more mechanical monsters every day. Incidentally, for whatever reason – and seriously, I'm talking about a history that's been wiped from the Matrix here – all these little mechanical people can transform into any shape that equals their mass. This is handy if you, human, get a kick out of the idea of being your own car. Practically speaking, though, you might as well just build a car and not risk ramming your face into another person's butt on the road, right? Why should a whole _race_ of beings have a whole chunk of programming designed just to turn into something else? I'll tell you why: we were born to infiltrate, to become one with the enemy, then annihilate it before they even see it coming.

Look, anything sentient hates to think it was created without a reason. We all want to know what the All Spark – in your case, maybe, God – wanted out of us. Nobody knows exactly how the All Spark made the first Cybertronian, before there were others to build the models to house new Sparks. What I'm about to say would get me slagged by Autobot and Decepticon alike: I think once, we were made for some other alien race. They made a bunch of us, used us to infiltrate and conquer some planet or another, then dumped the remainder of us and their nifty experiment on a random rock and left us, either on purpose or because they had to.

Because when a Cybertronian is born, we are sure as hell not nice, cultured little Sparklings. You think your children are hooligans? Try putting a Spark in something mechanical. We're born ready to kill. A Spark can take a totally innocuous shell of microchips and metal and turn itself into a war machine. And we're born already knowing how to transform.

That's right. I'm saying we all start out as Decepticons. But we're sentient, so we learn to not blow up everything in sight, and instead we get smart about it. And at some point, we must've gotten it up our processors to go take over a few other planets.

We call it _colonizing _now. But you know what? Cybertron ruled over no less than twenty-one planets. Eight of them were occupied by other sentient life forms. They called us their leaders, because if they didn't, we could have blown them to tiny bits before they even knew we were there.

Optimus Prime won't tell you that part. How we got those planets on our side is the kind of classified that maybe not even Our Lord Megatron may know. Even I'm just guessing. The Matrix of information that makes up our past is just a data bank, after all … data banks can be altered. Our history could be one thing one day and something else the next, and no one could prove otherwise.

We were benevolent rulers before we started blowing each other to the Pit, but we might not have always been. The colonials couldn't tell you; even the longest-lived biological life forms come nowhere near our lifespan.

We were sentient. What did you expect? Sentient creatures can't get along without forming some kind of society that doesn't involve exploding your neighbor on sight. We got curious about other planets. We got curious about ourselves. We specialized, studied, found occupations that benefited our fellows and ourselves. We started getting ideas about what you'd call philosophy and we constructed – pfft – artificial 'morals' to help us limp away from our base instincts.

Infiltrate. Blow shit up. Kill.

Ironic, isn't it? How it all comes full circle. Humanity has seen it, too: the way that pursuit of higher goals eventually leads them right back to where they started. Our Lord Megatron dressed it up in fancy words, but he got what he wanted: power. And he got it by sneaking right into the top of our futzy leadership. He didn't even need to pick an alt-form to do it.

Look: there's no reason to be more than our function. We do it damned well. We were built to be sneaky. Why do you think the Autobots are always a step behind? Because they keep trying to make nice with the locals. We're not meant for that. We're built to make sure you don't know we're there, until it's too late.

So, have fun running around with the Autobots, worshipping their leader Optimus Prime as they live their lies. What does it matter to you, what we're really like? With Our Lord Megatron dead and the All Spark destroyed, I can't say you'll be seeing me again.

Or maybe you will, but how will you know?

_Fin_

_I have no idea which Decepticon is speaking. You tell me._


End file.
